As events unfold, the U.S. is adjusting its policy on an issue on which it has been highly influential. Washington has been a strong supporter of the idea of getting gas from Central Asia –and in first instance from Azerbaijan– to Europe. It has considered this key to boosting Europe’s security of supply and reducing its energy dependence on Russia.

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While initially it favored Nabucco –the most prominent, biggest and most expensive of the pipeline projects– the U.S. administration has slowly shifted its position, moving to a broader support for the so-called Southern Corridor, as the future pipeline path from Azerbaijan to the European Union, across Georgia and Turkey, is called.

“We were perceived, certainly three years ago, [to be] very Nabucco-centric,” Mr. Morningstar said speaking at a conference over the weekend in Brussels. But “it’s become apparent, at least in the first instance, that there is not enough gas… to fill a full Nabucco pipeline, so our policy… is that we support the Southern Corridor,” he said.

Until a month ago, four projects were competing for that corridor. Nabucco and the BP-backed South-East Europe Pipeline both planned to carry gas to Central Europe, possibly all the way to Austria, while the Trans Adriatic Pipeline and ITGI would supply it to Italy.

But the exclusion of ITGI in February increased TAP’s chances. According to some, this clearly gave TAP the pole position in the overall race: One of TAP’s main sponsors is Norway’s Statoil, which also holds a stake in Shah Deniz, as does BP.

That could raise some concerns. If the Caspian gas goes to Italy, it will not offer much relief to countries in central Europe –Bulgaria first in the list– that are almost totally dependent on Russian gas.

Relieving that dependence was the original aim of the whole Southern Corridor concept, and Mr. Morningstar suggested in an interview that this goal hadn’t been forgotten in Washington. “The first priority has to be getting at least a reasonable amount of gas to the Balkans,” he said. “I think the Shah Deniz consortium and BP understand that if they were to build TAP, significant gas would have to be left in the Balkans,” he explained.

Whether that is feasable, will all depend on how much gas will be reaching Europe. TAP is designed to carry between 10 and 20 billion cubic meters of gas annually, so any significantly lower amount would be a challenge to its profitability, since the lower the volume carried, the higher per cost per unit. It would certainly not make economic sense if it could carry only 5 bcm a year.

Considering that no more than about 10 bcm a year are scheduled to be transported to Europe from the Shah Deniz field to Europe in the current decade, things could be tricky.

Unless, that is, more gas becomes available in the Caspian. If it does, the conundrum could be resolved. “We will know a lot more in the next year, year-and-a-half (about whether) there is any more than the 10,” Mr. Morningstar said.

About Real Time Brussels

The Wall Street Journal’s Brussels blog is produced by the Brussels bureau of The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires. The bureau has been headed since 2009 by Stephen Fidler, who was previously a correspondent and editor for the Financial Times and Reuters. Also posting regularly: Matthew Dalton, Viktoria Dendrinou, Tom Fairless, Naftali Bendavid, Laurence Norman, Gabriele Steinhauser and Valentina Pop.